Patriarchal Ideologies and Women`s Domestication.

Chapter Eleven (from The End of Prisons, 2013)
PATRIARCHAL IDEOLOGIES AND WOMEN’S DOMESTICATION
Mechthild Nagel
Didja ever notice
how Justice is a woman?
Not a man
Not a malecopsmalejudgesmalelawyers
Justice is a woman — Cathy Marston, 2012
1. Introduction
North American courtrooms depict Lady Justice (a cross between the Greek
goddess Themis and the Roman goddess Justitia) wearing a blindfold and
carrying a sword and scales. Given imprisoned intellectual Cathy Marston’s
verdict, it would appear to me that Lady Justice stands for women as prisoners
of a massive male error—the male, white, capitalist dominated injustice system
that perpetrates crimes againstthose who fall outside normed categories:
the poor, the queer, the disabled, the racialized Other, and the elderly.
This chapter focuses on the domestication and institutionalization of
women by the interlocking systems of capitalism, patriarchy, and other systems
of domination. These systems reinforce each other, so resistance often
seems futile—in particular, because as a group, women, and all those others
who are on the bottom of the “great chain of Being” are particularly ill
equipped to support each other.
Independently minded elite, working class, anarchist, and intersexed
women from Hypatia and Hildegard von Bingen, to Mary Wollstonecraft,
Sojourner Truth, Herculine Barbin, Emma Goldman, Aung San Suu Kyi, and
Wangari Maathai have criticized, resisted, or rejected social control emanating
from patriarchal regimes the world over. Feminist agitators have created
language and practices to advocate for the “rights of woman” or to resist “the
rule of the fathers.” They note that “the personal is political,” and criticize
interlocking systems of oppression (i.e., the ways in which race, class, religion,
ethnicity, national origin, or disability intersect with gender). They look
at sexual or gender harassment, date rape, marital rape, misogyny, femicide,
“the second shift” of housework, gendered division of labor, feminization of
poverty, the “glass ceiling,” the gender gap, as well as “pink color” (female)
versus white and “blue color” (male) job classifications.
148 MECHTHILD NAGEL
Some of the areas of patriarchal social control faced by women discussed
in this paper crisscross the public and private spheres: (1) the “domestic;”
(2) the workplace; (3) the criminal justice complex; and (4) (residential)
schools as other historical-social forms of oppression, which intersect with
racism and colonialism. I focus mainly on the endurance of sexist ideologies
and give empirical examples from the United States and Canada, but there are
cross-cultural implications of this analysis. For instance, one recent anthology
investigates the cross-border political economy, the effects of globalization,
the killings of over 500 women and girls in Ciudad Juárez, and notes how
grassroots organizations and mothers of the disappeared raise trouble to this
femicide, when the state failed to respond to these crimes (Gaspar de Alba
and Guzmán, 2010).
What ideological presuppositions make such failure possible, and what
constitutes an effective response to the patriarchal status quo? Resistance to
oppressive conditions tends to be individualized by popular discourses,
whether it is through Hollywood, corporate media, popular authors such as
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (2009) or by United States Supreme
Court decisions. Arguably, women’s agency seen solely through the individualized
lens is disempowering and will not lead to transformative justice.
After decades of calling “the personal political” much of contemporary
feminist theory and practice still revolves around the strategic opposites of
“sexual difference” and “equality.” It has its roots in the cooptation of the
“separate spheres” ideology (male breadwinner, female housewife), which led
to zealous support of temperance championing Victorian sensibilities of propriety
and social reformers’ support of protective legislation. This hampered
working class women’s participation in the labor force and secured the maleled
labor union’s demand for the husband’s “family wage.”
Another debate that has dominated feminist philosophy has centered on
the question of essentialism: what is the meaning of “woman,” if any, and
who might have license to speak on behalf of women? Iris Marion Young
(1994) has argued in favor of the Sartrean term of “seriality” to suggest that
“women” find ourselves thrown into a series (e.g., structurally through the
sexual division of labor) and a coherent identity is only formed when we band
together as women for a common goal or objective. I take my cue from Linda
Martín Alcoff whose advocacy for a “positionality approach” provides language
for a nuanced approach that avoids sweeping generalizations, white
solipsism, and a bucolic retreat into reactionary individualism:
Being a “woman” is to take up a position within a moving historical
context and to be able to choose what we make of this position and how
we alter this context. From the perspective of that fairly determinate
though fluid and mutable position, women can themselves articulate a
set of interests and ground a feminist politics” (1997, p. 150).
Patriarchal Ideologies and Women’s Domestication 149
Alcoff thus argues for a politics of identity, where identities serve as a
point of departure but never become reified or static. There are, of course,
many examples from women’s organizing for change that have not heeded
her cautionary advice. Much activism has been guided by a fearful politics of
entrenchment that serve the political interest of the few.
The fissures within Women’s Rights Movements (such as the first organized
one at Seneca Falls in upstate New York in 1848) often overshadowed
the momentum gained by gathering hundreds if not thousands, as witnessed at
the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing in 1995. Whether it concerns
woman’s suffrage (the key controversy of the nineteenth century) or
lesbians’ and sex workers’ rights (the latter constitutes a twentieth-century
provocation), which at times brings the Holy See and radical feminists to the
same side of the table, many strategic sessions have catered to fear, racist and
religious fervor, and co-opted the progressive socio-political agenda that
could have had a far reaching impact on the majority of women.
Again, as with the earlier campaigns against vice and dangerous occupations
for women of childbearing age, the competing theories undergirding the
principles of “ethic of care” (cultural feminism) and “equality for all” (liberal
feminism) continue to dominate the political discussions and perhaps impede
feminist agitation for change. What will the twenty-first century bring in
terms of feminist or solidarity organizing? To understand the challenges of
resisting social control, a review of dominant ideologies such as the unities
doctrine, the separate spheres doctrine that engendered the Cult of True
Womanhood, and the racist theory of the pathology of the black family is
necessary. How have women adapted and responded to these ideologies of
social control?
2. Imprisoning Ideologies
A. The Unities Doctrine
Woman has ovaries, a uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity
… It is often said that she thinks with her glands. . . . Humanity is male and man
defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an
autonomous being … He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other. Simone de Beauvoir, 1972
A key underlying ideology that concerns us here is that of patriarchy, the
domination of men over women based on the presumption that men have the
right to dominate women because they feel superior to them: “he is the subject,
she is the Other” (de Beauvoir, Ibid.; cf. also Sheffield, 1995). Enduring
worldviews, even those that obviously oppress people, fauna, and flora, seem
everlasting precisely because they seem natural, obvious, and commonsensical—
it would be comical to think otherwise.
Thus, John Adams chides his uppity wife Abigail, who implores him to
“remember the ladies,” with the following high-toned rhetoric: “I cannot but
150 MECHTHILD NAGEL
laugh. . . . We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems . . . [and]
completely subject Us to the Despotism of the Petticoat” (cited in Mandel,
1995, p. 405).
Judge William Blackstone’s legal invention of the “unities doctrine” in
family law is such an example (Williams, 1997). It seemed part of the divine
and natural order to give the head of family (pater familias ) a special status:
“husband and wife are one and the one is the husband,” as this fiction has
famously been summarized by Justice Black (cited in Freeman, 1995, p. 466).
Marriage contract obliges the wife to be “covered” by the husband, submit to
him at will, assume his family name, surrender her own name and belongings.
In turn, the husband is legally responsible for his kin. She cannot vote, get
loans or her own bank account, testify in court, face incrimination, nor pursue
advanced schooling or professional work outside the home. In other words,
the wife is reduced to the status of a minor. Upon the husband’s death, male
kin will receive all assets so that the wife may be reduced to a pauper depending
on kindness of kin and strangers. Thus, the unities doctrine also guarantees
that she is deemed “civilly dead” (Williams, 1991).
Western condemnation of misogynist interpretations of Shar’ia law or of
Muslim women’s practice of “veiling” seem hypocritical given the casual
neglect of human rights afforded to European and colonized women especially
since the advent of Christianity as the state religion, as for instance documented
throughout the history of persecutions of hundreds of thousands of
women, often of those who were unattached to a man and the pernicious history
of “coverture”—the symbolic, legal veiling of Christian and other nonMuslim women. Whether it was the implementation of religious manuals such
as the Witches’ Hammer (Kramer and Sprenger,1486), which intensified the
modern era witch craze, the Blackstone legal codes, or the 1804 Napoleonic
Code, which relegated the legal status of women to that of “children, felons,
and the insane,” misogynist fervor is part and parcel of the Western, Christianbased, patriarchal tradition (cf. LeGates, 1995, p. 496).
The unities doctrine seems to be outmoded and of little concern to modern
day feminists. Yet, coverture continues in the marriage-industrial complex.
Wedding vows often speak of submission and devotion and naming ceremonies
erase the family name. A vast majority of women, at least those who
are not from Latino countries, abandon the father’s name in favor of the husband
indicating the adherence to patriarchal social order (of control and obedience).
Political women such as Hillary Rodham are pressured to adopt their
spouse’s last name and thus eschew their independence and to avoid being
scandalized as so many of their political foremothers have been, who refused
to be bound to coverture—even when it was the law.
By contrast, Paula Gunn Allen (1984) reports that in matrilineal nations
of the Iroquois Confederacy, women who took the spouse’s name after marriage
were forbidden from pursuing political positions in the nation such as
the position of the Matron.
Patriarchal Ideologies and Women’s Domestication 151
B. The Separate Spheres Doctrine
There can be no doubt that our Nation has had a long and unfortunate history of
sex discrimination. Traditionally, such discrimination was rationalized by an attitude
of “romantic paternalism” which, in practical effect, put women not on a
pedestal, but in a cage. - Frontiero v. Richardson, 1973
Early nineteenth-century industrialization and Western expanse, trespassing
indigenous lands, arguably changed the public discourse and ideological fervor
regarding EuroAmerican gender relations. While immigrant unmarried
girls increasingly pursued factory work (not unpaid domestic work), hegemonic
anxious discourses shored up support for a slightly more progressive
version of social control ideology than the unities doctrine (Freeman, 1995).
The separate spheres doctrine recognizes women as “alive” (not civilly dead)
in the safe purview of the home. The upper-class white “lady” is put on a pedestal
and enjoys decision making in the tranquility of the home, away from
the loud, immoral demands of the public world, where the husband is busy
being at war with his (male) workers and averting labor discontent. She has a
civilizing, ennobling and religious duty on her husband and is in charge of
moral education of the young, including the sons.
This doctrine enshrines a “cult of domesticity” at a time when the radical
abolition movement against slavery got off the ground to be followed by the
suffrage movements after 1868. It also served a purpose for working class
men who did not wish for female competition. “Protective Legislation” at the
end of the nineteenth century should be considered a natural and euphemistic
outgrowth of this separate spheres doctrine of a now public patriarchal state,
because women were forbidden to work long hours, overnight, were not allowed
to lift heavy weights and could not pursue certain professions at all
(Freeman, 1995).
Women social reformers and anti-suffrage women activists also participated
in the defense of this restrictive labor law at the same time that they
began the first organized effort of daycare for working-class working women’s
children (Freeman, 1995; Marshall, 1995). It took another 100 years for
enlightened Supreme Court judges (Frontiero, for the majority opinion) to
acknowledge that much of this legal dance affected women’s capacity and
movement in public, whether at the workplace, the bank, or the jury pool, and
served strictly to cage women and make them separate and unequal. One curious
effect of this transatlantic domestic(ating) ideal of the passionless proper
lady is that Queen Victoria refused to sign a bill meant to criminalize lesbianism
in 1885, because she didn’t believe such behavior existed (Weitz, 1995, p.
449).
The cult of domesticity, also known as “Cult of True Womanhood,”
seems bound to stay. It has a complex feminist lineage of support from the
monarchist Olympe de Gouges to conservative anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly
and self-proclaimed feminist Sarah Palin on the one hand, and, ironically, to
suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and modern day cultural feminists such as
152 MECHTHILD NAGEL
Carol Gilligan on the other. By making this sweeping and controversial claim,
I simply wish to probe and revision the feminist “sexual difference versus
equality” debate. At stake is whether the defense of psycho-social and biological
difference overrides a single-minded liberal concern for eradicating socially
existing forms of gender discrimination.
Cultural feminists charge that girls and boys do behave differently from
birth on, independent of social pressures. Carol Gilligan (1982) developed her
famous ethic of care approach based on observations she made of girls’ moral
deliberations, which she thought to be remarkably absent in boys’ decisionmaking
skills. However, she also advocated that a best possible ethics would
involve both the justice paradigm followed by boys and the care paradigm
followed by girls. Here we detect a functionalist, biological determinist argument
that plays into separate spheres ideology (cf. Scott, 1996, p. 1057).
Clearly, Aristotle’s differentiation of the sexes with his defense of the natural
complement theory provides an ideological foundation for the rational, autonomous
man versus emotional, relational woman framework that is part and
parcel of the cult of domesticity—and, I would add, equally of modern day
celebratory expressions of feminist psychology.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, best known for authoring the Declaration of Sentiments
and Resolutions (Stanton, 2007), thus initiating a protracted struggle
for the women’s vote, also relied on the (racist, sexist) cult of domesticity
when it served her. This is already implicit in the 1848 declaration: “He has
withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded
men—both natives and foreigners.” Twenty years later, Stanton engages in an
outright racist, elitist, and chauvinist attack on freed black men. She held that
they were not entitled to the vote, despite the 15th Amendment, because they
were “ignorant sambos”; and in response to the heckling of George Downing,
a black supporter of male superiority, she responds:
When Mr. Downing puts the question to me: are you willing to have the
colored man enfranchised before the women, I say no; I would not trust
him with my rights; degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic
with the governing power than ever our Saxon rulers are. If women
are still to be represented by men, then I say let only the highest type of
manhood standard at the helm of State. (cited in Davis, 1981, pp. 84–85)
Eclipsing the voting rights of black women, Stanton positions herself as
a defender of the purity standards of the white dominant race and as Angela
Y. Davis (1981) points out completely disregarding the material conditions of
abject poverty, lack of reparations, the formation of the Ku Klux Klan and
overall political uncertainties that engulf black people who remain in the former
Confederacy.
Does the cult of domesticity constitute progress over the unities doctrine?
Looking closer at lived experiences, it seems as if with the emphasis of
confining EuroAmerican women to the home and garnering the family wage
Patriarchal Ideologies and Women’s Domestication 153
for EuroAmerican men, women suddenly had less decision making power—
this was particularly the case for aristocratic women who could no longer effect
change on the estate of the absentee husband and for skilled women, who
were no longer encouraged to pursue their trades (Bryson, 1992).
However, the Cult of True Womanhood proved to be elastic enough to
accommodate racist oppression and to endure even though economic, social,
and political conditions changed for the better for many women through hard
fought struggles for unionization and concomitant benefits of family leave,
day care centers, and better education so that women have now entered most
of the disciplines. But double standards still prevail in the public and private
spheres. Mothers especially are still expected to do the bulk of household
chores (“the second shift”) and are the first to be blamed if their child fails to
live up to the moral education mothers “ought” to provide. This is particularly
true with respect to racially sexualized expectations of the black family—the
controlling images of black womenhood (Collins, 1990).
C. White Supremacist Anxieties about the Black Family
Portraying African-American women as stereotypical mammies, matriarchs,
welfare recipients, and hot mommas has been essential to the political economy
of domination fostering black women’s oppression. Challenging these controlling
images has long been a core theme in black feminist thought. -Patricia Hill
Collins, 1990
Stanton’s racist exclamation about the “ignorant sambo” haunts the feminist
imagination about sisterhood even now. Frederick Douglass was asked not to
show up on platforms with speakers such as Susan B. Anthony when she
toured the South to garner financial support for suffrage among wealthy white
male patrons (Davis, 1981). A century later, the known supporter of racial
segregation Democratic senator “Judge” Howard W. Smith, made an infamous
move to add “sex” to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The National Woman’s
Party supported him. However, other feminist and civil rights organizations
opposed his move, because they feared that it would detract from addressing
racial discrimination (Bryson, 1992).
Angela Y. Davis has argued that much of racialized discourse has focused
on pathologizing the black family. New York’s liberal Senator Patrick
Moynihan’s report provides inflammatory analysis by suggesting that the
black family faces high divorce rates precisely due to the weak status of the
male and an overbearing female, whose matriarchal tendencies are out of step
with the rest of society. This constitutes an unabashed defense of white public
patriarchy as the cherished norm of society. In the context of a racialized sexuality,
black women could never aspire to the white Victorian motherhood
cult, and their putative sexual independence as family matriarchs brings up
memories of yesteryear’s fierce, uncontrollable witch (Collins, 1990;
Barstow, 1994).
154 MECHTHILD NAGEL
Contemporary films such as Precious (Lee, 2009), which are meant as
stinging social criticism, and that attempt to humanize black women, run the
risk of reinscribing a known racist, sexist ideology. Precious has received
mixed reviews, some praising it for its stark realism and unrelenting focus on
social problems, others criticizing it as “the most damaging film to the black
image since the Birth of the Nation” (Armond White, 2009). It portrays a
young darker skinned woman (Gabourey Sidibe as Precious) who is raped and
impregnated by her mother’s boyfriend. Her opening line conveys the pains of
internalized racial hatred—she imagines herself as glamour girl alongside a
light skinned boyfriend who has nice hair.
Black women in the United States are victimized at the same time that
they are blamed for the ill-named “black on black” violence and being mothers
qua “welfare queens” of “young superpredators” (Feder, 2007; Nagel,
2011). What does not get named in these media-driven discourses of victim
blaming is the government’s War on Drugs (begun in 1971), which has ensnared
more black men and women than any other group, as well as other
policing measures with the result that one in three black men will find himself
jailed during his lifetime and black women have faced the fastest increase of
imprisonment thanks to the War on Drugs (Davis, 2003).
In the following, while highlighting aspects of the state’s biopower, the
subjection of women through regulatory techniques, I will focus on the “private”
sphere.
3. The Discourse of “Domestic Violence”
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault famously writes, “Is it surprising
that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble
prisons?” (1977, p. 228). He persuasively argues that these are places of
social control, where deviancy is constructed and policed to the point that the
pupil, prisoner, or the person dubbed mentally ill will all be monitored to the
point that they will become “docile bodies.”
Such is the implied intent of institutional power and the expression of
hegemony. Whether it is successfully executed is another matter, since
“where there is power, there is also resistance” (Foucault, 1978, p. 96). However,
Foucault, too, has blind spots as he succumbs to the division of “public
man, private woman” (Elshtain, 1993), by highlighting (Western) institutions
in the public sphere. He is mostly silent on the private realm (except of
course, in History of Sexuality, when he remarks on the trope of the heterosexual
Malthusian couple), and overplays the docile effect of Jeremy Bentham’s
panopticon—of the all-seeing gaze that disciplines the prisoners in a
way that they turn the gaze inward. He leaves out the colonial state’s racialized
brutalization of prisoners (James, 1996), and is silent on the effects of the
modern prison on women (Dodge, 2006). Surprisingly, Foucault also leaves
out the asylum (which he also writes about) in the above quote, because argua
arguaPatriarchal
Ideologies and Women’s Domestication 155
bly, it is the modern asylum, rather than the factory halls, upon which American
penitentiaries were modeled (Cohen, 1992, cited in Dodge, pp. 22–23).
Arguably, the asylum has been the depository for European women after
the end of the witch persecutions. With the emergence of the enclosures of the
common and industrialization, women increasingly became a threat to male
breadwinners. Stanton has this radical, hyperbolic, feminist insight to “correct”
a Foucauldian view: “Society, as organized today under the man power,
is one grand rape of womanhood, on the highways, in our jails, prisons, asylums,
in our homes, alike in the world of fashion and of work” (cited in
Bryson, 1992, p. 43).
What is the discourse of confinement and violation today? When it
comes to the social realities and to identity formations of the girl child and
women, it is the home, the “domestic realm,” that is a premier site of contestation
and violence. California was the first state to enact the Domestic Violence
Center Act to provide safe houses for battered women at the local level;
it used funds from marriage license fees (Stevenson and Love, 1999). Linking
domestic violence to marriage taxation was probably because it used to be
narrowly defined as “spousal abuse.”
Labeling something as “domestic” has the ring of “harmlessness”—
domestic violence, as harm done between friends, acquaintances, or bloodrelated
persons is described. After all, it is not akin to “stranger rape” or random
assault on the streets—unless of course, the victim “asked for” the sexual
assault in terms of how she dressed, and why was she on the streets (or the
bar, as extension of the “street’) at 2 a.m. by herself?
Such questions were raised in a court of law regarding the gang rape of a
woman in a bar in Bedford, Massachusetts (Butler, 1993). In this notorious
court case, the defense implied that the wild woman who is roaming bars is
not properly “domesticated.” She chose to defy her role foisted upon by heteropatriarchal
Eurocentric social norms, and this is where another definition
of “domestic” comes to play: this has to do with the Latin roots of “domus”
(house) and “dominus” (master of the house and by inference lord over cattle,
children, and certainly his wife and any unwed sisters).
Domestic then has a ring of “ownership” and putting it together with
“violence” invites confusion; how can somebody be castigated as violent, if
he couldn’t do what he pleases with his property? Indeed this is the grounds
for 2000 years of Euro-American legal wrangling whether to endow the female
partner with personhood or continue to consider her chattel who could
be chastised with a stick no bigger than the man’s thumb—clearly, a compromise
solution of the “justice system” that was clearly intent to keep the
woman (or girl, traded from the father to the future husband) in a subjugated
role. Finally, using terms like “domestic” violence rather than “battering” may
just “obscure the relationship between gender and power by failing to define
the perpetrators and victims” (Meyers, 1994, cited in Marston, 2011, p. 82).
Radical feminists have pointed out that we live in a rape culture. Catherine
MacKinnon famously espouses that rape, “from women’s point of view,
156 MECHTHILD NAGEL
is not prohibited; it is regulated” (1983, p. 651). That explains the legal reality
of the difficulty of obtaining rape convictions against acquaintances, family
members or boyfriends.
Still hotly debated on listservs today is whether spousal rape is an oxymoron.
Until the late 1970s, rape laws exempted husbands if they violated
their own wives, and even today, husbands are exempted from rape prosecutions
if they assault their wives while they are asleep, unconscious or mentally
disabled, i.e. when the women (or girls) are unable to give consent.
Finally, there remains a patriarchal urge to legislate morality of women
who pursue sex work—it is an odd adage that prostitution is the oldest trade,
yet radical feminists content that the institution of heterosexual marriage as a
form of patriarchally sanctioned prostitution—a father “trading in” his daughter
to the best bidder, the future husband. Practices of bride prize (or lobola)
and dowry turn brides into chattel, even if justifications are given that these
guarantee her subsistence living or insure her husband.
Bridal negotiations may result in grave conflict, or they could be results
of restitutions for premarital rape or consensual sex. It’s surely a sign of patriarchal
codification of such payments that are legally sanctioned and celebrated
through the rites manifested in the marriage-industrial complex, even as
benign as the fatherly gesture of “giving away the bride” rather than scandalized
as women’s sex work certainly is (cf. Narayan, 1997; Kempadoo and
Doezema, 1996; Dewey, 2010).
One impetus for penning the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments was Stanton’s
envy of Haudenosaunee women who lived (and continue to live) in egalitarian
relationships free from male abuse, rape, or custody battles, leading
suffragist Matilde Joslyn Gage to exclaim: “never was justice more perfect,
never civilization higher” (Gage, 1893 [1998]; cf. Allen, 1984).
In the 1990s, we have the curious situation of a putative egalitarian enforcement
by police officers: when it’s not clear to them who started the
“trouble” both parties may be arrested; several states have mandatory arrest
policies—with the troubling effect that children are not only being traumatized
by the parents’ fight but also by the state’s zealous intervention (Bernstein,
2005).
The watershed case that brought state violence into sharp relief (through
“benign neglect” of spousal torture) was that of Tracey Thurman:
[Thurman] won her suit against a Connecticut police department for
negligence and violation of her civil rights in 1985. Her husband receives
a fifteen-year sentence for attacking her, stabbing her and repeatedly
kicking her in the head during 1983 while police and neighbors
were in the vicinity and ignored Tracy’s pleas for help. (Stevenson and
Love, 1999)
Cathy Marston (2011) decries the blatant disregard for battered women’s
well-being as chronicled in her own story, eerily reminiscent of Thurman’s
Patriarchal Ideologies and Women’s Domestication 157
torturous ordeal. Rather than suffering under “benign neglect” of the police,
she finds herself convicted through trumped up charges of burglary, as a “byproduct”
of the mandatory arrest policies (although her male assailants never
got arrested):
As I was going unconscious and could taste the blood in my mouth . . .
smothering me into the concrete, a police officer pulled-up to the curb
five feet from my head. The officer laughed with my assailant, just as
the . . . arresting officer had done with this batterer and my abusive ex. If
the first unlawful arrest had been quickly and properly adjudicated to
exonerate me and arrest my batterers, the second attempt on my life
would never have occurred. Where would these abusive men get the idea
that they could beat and kill a woman, and that these cops would arrest
HER? From the larger American context of blaming women for the male
violence committed against them and obviously from the Texas justice
system. (p. 75)
The Texas Council on Family Violence reports that, sadly, Marston’s
criminalization as victim is not an aberration but occurs 20 percent of the time
when police respond to a “domestic violence” call (Ibid., p. 73). Andrea
Smith (2005) paints an equally grim analysis regarding violence against Indian
women on reservations, and yet, she is also quick to note that mainstream
anti-violence movement’s collusion with the state for funding feeds into an
expansion of the prison industrial complex that social movement groups such
as INCITE! and Critical Resistance have resisted against (cf. pp. 170–171).
4. Death by Culture?
Occasionally, a “death by culture” argument will be employed in the courtroom
when the Empire sees it fit in non-Western occupied countries. Narayan
(1997) notes this argument when well-meaning British colonialists, peak into
localized practices such as decrying sati (widow burning) in the nineteenth
century and castigated all Indian men as being complicit in such practice; the
widows suffered a worse death than that of personal choice to commit suicide:
they were marked women by the woes of their culture.
By contrast, Uma Narayan also takes stock of the high numbers of
women murder victims in the United States and argues that no “cultural defense”
of gun-toting, Christian, heterosexual, patriarchal men is used; instead
the murders are constructed in a most personalized, individual ways completely
bereft of cultural codification. “Death by culture” argumentation (and
take any non-Western, non-Christian rite dubbed as “barbaric”) finds a hearing
in the contemporary courtroom, which otherwise prides itself in taking
seriously personal responsibility:
158 MECHTHILD NAGEL
Brooklyn Supreme Court justice Edward Pincus sentences Chinese immigrant
Dong Lu Chen to 5 years probation for using a claw hammer to
smash the skull of his wife. Pincus concludes, that traditional Chinese
values about adultery and loss of manhood drove Chen to kill his wife.
Pincus justifies Chen’s probationary sentence by stating that Chen was
just as much a victim as his wife due to extenuating circumstances. The
Chen decision sent a message to battered immigrant women that they
had no recourse against domestic violence. (Stevenson and Love, 1999;
emphasis added)
So, Dong Lu Chen’s defense, which appeals not only on cultural
grounds to Chinese (patriarchal) values but given the culture of the United
States courts is informed by patriarchal values. Thus, he is able to “fraternize”
with the jury and judge to receive leniency. However, immigrant women who
attempt to use cultural values (male breadwinner status, etc.) rarely accomplish
the task to persuade the United States courts to listen to their stories and
consider mitigating circumstances.
Interestingly, the first time the “battered woman syndrome” was allowed
into the courtroom by the presiding judge was in the late 1980s, when the
defendant was on trial for killing her lesbian partner. But she was convicted
anyway. In that case, the judge allowed the battered woman’s syndrome defense
changing it to “battered person defense.” The defense attributes the
guilty verdict to the jury’s homophobia (Ibid.). Overall, since the introduction
of the “battered woman’s” defense, juries have been reluctant to acquit the
defendant und unwilling to acknowledge the environmental thesis (of longterm
abuse and suffering) and its abolitionist implications (Nagel, 2000).
What do girls and women face upon being committed to jails and prisons?
The next section will describe the collateral damages of the carceral regime—
in its most isolating and punitive form.
5. Not Part of My Sentence?
In 1999, Amnesty International published a provocative report “Not Part of
My Sentence: Violations of the Human Rights of Women in Custody.” The
report made it clear that women who enter the prison system are not immune
to further violence by state actors. Similarly, Human Rights Watch’s report
“All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in United States State Prisons”
(1996) details endemic sexual abuse by male prisoners who work in women’s
prisons and the casual approach of prison authorities to remedy corruption
and coercive control. Furthermore, currently, the prison is ill equipped to handle
the special needs of female, of transgendered persons, and of those who
have mental disabilities.
The vast majority of women prisoners are mothers of small children;
some of them are teen mothers; many enter jail and prisons while they are
pregnant without any pre- or postnatal care, which can have dire consequencPatriarchal
Ideologies and Women’s Domestication 159
es for their health. Miscarriages are disproportionately higher than “in the free
world.” They may be forced into poorly fitted tight clothing which further
harms the mother and fetus or they are subjected to being shackled while giving
birth (Amnesty International, 2010).
While abortion on demand in prisons has been curtailed by the Hyde
Amendment (1976), some prisoners report being coerced into abortions, especially
African American women (Johnson, 2002). This magnifies and eerily
echoes the history of reproductive violence and genocide committed against
indigenous, black, and brown women since 1492 (cf. Ybanez, 2007).
Ana María García’s film, La Operación (1982) chronicles the United
States population control policy “Operation Bootstrap” of the late 1950s,
which succeeded so well that “over one-third of all Puerto Rican women of
childbearing age have been sterilized. The procedure is so common that it is
simply known as La Operación.” Conducting coerced sterilizations is a major
violation of Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and constitutes a war crime
if done during armed conflict.
However, some women prisoners disagree that they face further violation
and oppression in the prisons, as noted in “Criminalizing Women—Past
and Present” (Kilty, 2011). It chronicles the lives of aboriginal women in particular
who have had to work through decades of substance abuse, of sexual
violence by relatives, endemic poverty, neglect, and more. Still they find the
prison can be a refuge from the terror, grief, and highs that numb their bodies
temporarily.
For Sharon Acoose, who was sexually abused since age three, jail provided
a structured, safe place with accommodations so far beyond the street
life that she developed bulimia because she didn’t want to get fat. Her eating
disorder stopped once she left jail and was again living on the streets. Acoose
notes with great honesty, “I liked jail because I was tough and jail gave me
status, a name so to speak. I was the girl. People would move when I walked
by” (Kilty, 2011, p. 50). Her greatest joy was to be feared and she felt invincible
as the jail’s premier bully. Only when she became sober she realized that
those desires made her into a “full time looser” and life was passing by (p.
51).
Acoose’s life “on the installment plan” (living between the streets and
jails for some eighteen years) began once her father moved off the reservation,
and it was during the hated times spent in segregation for infractions or
self-harm, she pondered the wages of “Indianness”: “I didn’t want to be an
Indian because of the extreme racism my people faced and I knew I couldn’t
be white, so who could I be? I felt only isolation of the body, mind, soul and
spirit” (p. 53). In segregation, she could feel the extent of “spirit murder” that
the prison system represents.
The prison system for First Peoples of Canada is an extension, a continuation
of the legacy of the repressive residential school system to which Indian
children were subjected (both in Canada and the United States), which robbed
the youth of their culture, belief system, and language, amounting to cultural
160 MECHTHILD NAGEL
genocide. Not surprisingly, facing criminalization of drug addictions, grinding
poverty, and stigma-related sex work, they are vastly overrepresented in the
Canadian (and United States) prison system (Kilroy and Pate, 2011; Ybanez,
2007) at the same time that Indian women are also “underpoliced” (Kilroy and
Pate, 2011) and victimized to the point that Amnesty International calls for an
urgent investigation of vast numbers of missing and murdered women.
More than one in three Native women will face rape assault in her lifetime,
and rapists most often escape judicial process due to the federal/colonist
imposition of a complexity of laws (Amnesty International, 2004). Wholesale
criminalization of a people, be it Puerto Ricans, blacks in the United States,
indigenous people, or others who are oppressed as a group, shows the interaction
of racism, imperialist motivations and buttressed by patriarchal ideology,
so that the giddy multitude commits violence against each other but does not
band together against “the system of injustice.”
The system, on the contrary, creates the illusion of the rights-bearing individual
who may seek redress through the courts (Davis, 2003) and may also
be punished qua individual for trespassing against the law. Classical liberal
ideology disguises the benign social contract, which in fact is a racial/sexual
contract by propertied white heterosexual men against those who are Othered
(Pateman and Mills, 2007).
6. Rape Laws—Protection or Repression of Women?
Rape of prisoners has been a serious issue that finally was acknowledged in
the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003. However, its focus is on
rape in male prisons and is particularly concerned with rape occurring between
prisoners. It remains silent on the rampant violations occurring between
staff and prisoners in female prisons. The way it has been translated by Texas
is that any act (even holding hands) is punishable not only as sexual misconduct
but as sexual abuse and a lifelong label as sexual offender. When two
lovers were written up for misconduct and sent to segregation, one of them
fearing the label accused the girlfriend of rape, the accused hung herself. A
friend of the woman who committed suicide writes:
Ever since the feds enacted that “Prison Rape Elimination Act,” it has
done nothing to help us [women]. Now someone is dead. With her girl
crying rape to save herself from being convicted of a sexual abuse
charge, it leaves Jamie with a sexual assault charge and having to register
as a sex offender when she gets out and it’ll be on her record, affecting
her parole chances and chances of getting into a halfway house.
(Law, 2009, p. 71)
What then can we say in general about legal reforms that might benefit
imprisoned women?
Patriarchal Ideologies and Women’s Domestication 161
7. What Does Gender-Responsive Service Mean to an Abolitionist?
Gender responsive service is a complex and contested issue. It can be a platform
for meaningful improvements in women’s prison and important services
given to transgender prisoners. On the other hand, it can be a way of increasing
penalties. Whereas a pregnant mother might be released early from prison,
a prison with excellent pre- and postnatal arrangements might sway the parole
board to retain the prisoner to give birth in prison. Mara L. Dodge (2006) notes
that nineteenth-century judges in Illinois were reluctant to send pregnant women
to prison, not based on humanitarian concerns, but due to cost-benefit accounting:
pregnant women and the subsequent prison care (crèche) of babies
would not be cost-effective in a prison environment that was supposed to extract
as much menial labor from the convicts as it could (pp. 31–32).
Hardly a bleaker picture on gender disparities can be found than that
from a chaplain in 1930: “To be a male convict in this prison would be quite
tolerable; but to be a female convict, for a protracted period, would be worse
than death” (cited in Dodge, 2006, p. 14). This sentiment is reiterated in May
Barr’s harrowing account of surviving New York’s prison, Riker’s Island—
the largest jail in the world, housing over 20,000 remand and convicted women,
men, and children (Barr, 2007).
The recurrent theme in all these critiques is that of creating the modern
penitentiary along norms that would seem “reasonable” to house large numbers
of men. Nineteenth-century women reformers such as Elizabeth Fry, beholden
to the Cult of True Womanhood ideal, heaped much blame on the
loud, unkempt women prisoners rather than on the material conditions in
which they were forced to survive. Even so, Fry would have been aghast at
“gender-neutral” accommodations, so that men can work in shower areas in
women’s prison because of “equal opportunity” provisions for employees.
By the 1970s, gender-specific prisons, inspired by disciplinary regime of
reformatories, vanished and “co-educational” prisons appeared (Dodge, p.
21). So, it is ironic that gender-specificity would be demanded again; my worry
is that if one operates under a reform paradigm, one is always inclined to
make excuses for sending women (and men) to prison and for long stretches
of time, because it will be a tolerable experience. Julia Sudbury argues that
creating gender and trans-sensitive spaces in prisons goes counter the spirit of
“maroon abolitionism”:
This interaction between racism and trans-phobia in the prison is the basis
for an antiracist, gender-queer, anti-prison agenda promoted by black
transgender and gender non-conforming activists. In contrast to calls to
develop a “normative transgender prison order,’” or trans-sensitive prisons
(Edney, 2004, pp. 336-37), the participants point to the systemic nature
of gender violence as part of the structures of imprisonment, and reject
the possibility of gender liberation under conditions of captivity. In
162 MECHTHILD NAGEL
so doing, they seek to transform anti-prison politics by calling for the
abolition of gender policing as part of a broader abolitionist agenda.
(2010, p. 18)
Clearly, resistance to enforced gender behaviors instead of advocating
for trans-sensitive prisons is necessary. Following recommendations by Andrea
Smith (2005) and others, gender-responsiveness in the abolitionist context
can mean to care for girls in non-punitive open healing sites such as a
Healing Lodge for indigenous Americans and First Nations girls, where they
can get holistic treatment for trauma, for state-generated violence, etc., and
get educational opportunities that are meaningful rather than coercive and
test-oriented.
Most Western feminist criminologists calls for expert-driven genderspecific,
trauma-informed treatments in prisons and would take into account
the girl’s personal history of abuse and drug dependency. However, many
girls and young women have been intensely studied by (white) expert personnel
to very little avail (Koo, 2010).
Working with a community justice paradigm that empowers the “nonexperts”
such as children as peer trainers guided by an abolitionist framework
may have more lasting results to bring about healing; I avoid language of “restorative
justice” or “rehabilitation” because those terms suggest that there has
been bucolic non-violence in our cities, towns, and rural areas some mythic
time ago, when in fact, the United States was founded on slavery and genocidal
practices for which it has never been held accountable.
8. Resistance and Survival
From Native America (Neve and Pate, 2005; Amnesty International, 2008) to
urban America, the psychic and social costs of brutalizing and institutionalizing
children of color are immense. The following excerpt is from Roslyn, participating
in a writing group while incarcerated. She faced victimization as a child,
fought back, and was criminalized by a vindictive court system, sentenced to
fifty years for an offense she committed at seventeen. Roslyn imagines the same
judge as her audience, showing him that she has moved beyond victim status:
Did you see no potential in me? You noted my high IQ, how “articulate”
I was, how “mature.” I’d run away from home because I refused to let
my mother keep hurting me. You put me in a home for bad kids; my
roommate wasn’t even sane. I left there, too, so you put me in a group
home. You call that help? No matter who I tried to tell, no one got it. So
then you sentenced me, said no hope for rehabilitation, said I’m as good
as dead. Just like my mother: kicks, flights of stairs, words that made me
flinch. Well, you were both wrong. I have a life. I have a beautiful
daughter, a college education. I teach parenting skills. I make a difference
in people’s lives. You never gave me a chance, so I made my own.
Patriarchal Ideologies and Women’s Domestication 163
My poverty, skin color, background, past—who at age seventeen can’t
change, won’t grow? You robbed me of my youth, of my belief in justice.
But from the graveyard, the barbed wire, and the cinderblock, I’m
resurrected. I’m worthy. I’m somebody. (cited in Boudin, 2010a, p. 298)
Roslyn is exemplary in refusing to make the prison and prism (of violence,
of racism and sexism, of institutionalization, of gate keeping, and revenge)
her home and destiny. Instead, she transcends and transforms, turning,
in Assata Shakur’s words, “walls into bridges” to bring hope to others.
Many prisoners turn to bibliotherapy to escape the noise of the prison
environment; these might range from romance novels to urban fiction, selfhelp
books or African American writings from slavery narratives to the contemporary
critiques of white supremacist societies (Sweeney, 2010). Here, of
course, as with any prison surveillance, censorship of reading material that is
considered “insurrectionist” is commonplace.
Rather than insuring the maintenance of docile bodies—just as during
ante bellum times on the plantation—imprisoned intellectuals (James, 2003)
are thought of as disturbing the peace that the pervasive lull of illiteracy
brings to prison administrators the world over. The Roslyn’s of the world and
their indomitable spirit are utterly threatening to the prison regime—even
though ironically, once a majority of women prisoners is involved in collegebound
education, they stop fighting with each other, frown on idleness, and
develop a real sense of purpose as the prison becomes another institution of
higher learning. Kathy Boudin (2010b) reports that as soon as college education
disappeared at Bedford Hills prison thanks to the draconian, vindictive
laws of the 1990s, violence ensued among the women and a real sense of
hopelessness settled in.
How do schools fit into this picture of social control, surveillance and a
sense of purposelessness? The next section provides an insight of the carceral
regime as a continuum through a girl’s coming of age in a punitive, heteropatriarchal
and racist society.
9. The School-to-Prison Pipeline
As many critics of the prison industrial complex have noted (e.g., Davis,
2003; Weissman, 2008), the recruitment for imprisonization cannot start early
enough. Urban schools are a quasi-militarized zone with “resource officers”—
otherwise known as armed police—stationed at metal detector gates who have
increasingly displaced school counselors, so that California now has more of
these resource officers than counselors in schools (Schnyder, 2009). Some
children are being singled out for special attention. If they display good behavior,
military recruiters will invite them to join the army, if they are in defiance,
it is the reform schools and detention centers that will await them.
The ideological expectation of girls and women’s turpitude give us insight
into the history of modern policing and criminalizing women and girls.
164 MECHTHILD NAGEL
Once women’s reformatories were firmly established, it so happened that the
state zealously expanded the domain of punishable moral offenses during the
Progressive Era, and ironically, female reformers happily assisted prosecutors
in naming outlaw women who dared to walk the streets, deal in alcohol or
showed other signs of waywardness.
Politicians believed that “reformatories” weren’t actually prisons and
would assist women to fall in line with the expectations of the Cult of True
Womanhood. “Women often served longer sentences for misdemeanor crimes
than men did for more serious felonies” (Dodge, 2006, p. 20). Mara L. Dodge
focuses her study on Illinois, and what is important to point out is that “freed”
black women in the South served time in the convict lease system, not being
afforded time in the troublesome, but much better conditions of the reformatories
reserved for white women, if they were incarcerated at all (Davis, 1998).
What does this brief retrospective mean for contemporary images of
“fallen” girls? I would argue that the relational aggression hypothesis fits into
the continuation of moral double standards, namely regarding behaviors expected
of girls and boys and what happens if either one falls from graces or
pedestals. While the “moral fall” is harder for girls of all colors, girls who
transgress sexual norms, e.g., showing lesbian tendencies, face harsher policing
(Himmelstein and Brückner, 2011).
Homelessness, then, is a particularly acute problem for gay and lesbian
youth as well as for transgendered and gender non-conforming persons, because
of the homophobic/transphobic hostility faced in the (foster) home and
threat of subsequent expulsion from home as well as school grounds (Sudbury,
2010; Baus et al., 2006).
Orlando Patterson (1982) has written persuasively about the psychic effects
of United States slavery in terms of natal alienation. We can extend this
analysis to United States imprisonment, precisely because of state-sponsored
slavery in the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which set enslaved people free
at the same time that it codified slavery in prisons (James, 2005; Nagel,
2008). Just as Sojourner Truth lamented in her speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” in
1851, that she lost all of her children to the auction block, today’s prisoners
risk losing custody of their children because of a federal reform measure:
Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). Victoria Law (2009) movingly describes
the cruelty of lack of visitation rights with loved ones and hunger
strikes engaged to demand placement in a prison closer to home. From a
mother’s perspective, we can now talk about “pre-natal” alienation (Paley,
2010) given conditions in United States jails and prisons as well as conditions
outside the prison that include abject poverty, battering by male partners, preventable
communicable diseases, which are all rampant when living in stressful,
war-like, crowded quarters whether it is “minimum security” (shelters or
barracks) or “maximum security” (prisons or detention centers).
Patriarchal Ideologies and Women’s Domestication 165
10. Social Movements and Counter Movements
From the discrimination of women that led to imprisonment behind “domestic
walls” to persecution for witchcraft and other forms of social exclusion have
been propagated by religiously motivated ideologies, political regimes, and
economic relations of production favoring men (fathers and sons). Elite white
women have not only exploited the “sexual difference” by appealing to “patriotic”
or Victorian womanhood—most recently Phyllis Schlafly who helped
to derail the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s—but have also benefited
from supporting eugenics, race, religious, class, and caste based hierarchies
and medical practices that are harmful to girls and women.
Much of Schlafly’s slick rhetoric is based on Aristotle’s natural complement
theory of men and women. She claims that women qua “patriotic”
homemakers are equal to their husbands, and feminists shore up inequality by
becoming like men, e.g. by supporting the military draft for women—an “unpatriotic”
move (cf. Marshall, 1995, p. 552). She rallied her troops against the
feminist evils of “comparable worth, subsidized child care, family leave, and
abortion” (p. 557). Since the 1990s, she toned down her attack by supporting
the “mommy track” and “family friendly workplaces” (Ibid., p. 558).
Much of feminist organizing has also been fraught by internal divisions
and racist fears as well as homophobic politics of appeasement. This was true
during the seventy-two-year-long struggle for the single issue campaign of
women’s suffrage, when women’s organizations decided to purge lesbians
from their rolls because they feared that the “lavender menace” would derail
their credibility for other pressing feminist demands such as pay equity and
abortion rights; lesbian rights was not a priority (Ransdell, 1995, p. 642).
Thus, given the internal divisions among women and girls, surprisingly,
the oppression of over half of humanity has not led to a revolt of the “ladies,”
which Abigail Adams had threatened to organize for seeing that her husband
conspired successfully in excluding the fairer sex from the United States constitution.
However, working class or un-casted girls and women having no
class or caste privilege to lose have organized trade unions, fostered social
unionism and welfare rights organizations, and rallied for laws changing employment
conditions rather than focusing single mindedly on the right to vote
(since they knew that suffrage within the capitalist system meant little improvement
for their own material conditions) (cf. Zinn, 2003; Robowtham,
1973; Hannam, 2007; Davis, 1981). The Lawrence, Massachusetts “Mill girls”
were in the forefront of militant labor strikes during the 1840s—an interesting
irony given that the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments was silent on working
women’s grievances and trade unionism in many sectors today tends to be in
solid male leadership. To counter this, labor women created the Coalition of
Labor Union Women to generate the next generation of female leaders.
166 MECHTHILD NAGEL
11. Conclusion: Resistant Voices to Public Patriarchy
Whether women or girls are behind walls of the injustice system, called the
prison-industrial complex or other version of “domestic” walls (Nagel, 2007;
Nagel, 2008), they have always resisted their repressive conditions, and now,
they do even more so, in a world that is increasingly interconnected. Groups
such as INCITE! Women of Color against Violence continue the intersectional
work of the 1970s Combahee River Collective with a new focus on the
challenges of the prison-industrial complex which has increased ten-fold in
the last forty years and the militarization of communities of color. INCITE!
also works in coalition with transgender and gender non-conforming persons
of color who face the brunt of criminalization at all ages.
I shall close with a caveat: while cell phones have increased cyberactivism
from Porto Alegre, Brazil, to Teheran, Iran, the demand for these
products has also lead to the increasingly publicized rape committed as an act
of war against many Congolese women and girls. What is rarely remarked
upon is that one of the contributing causes of rape is an ingredient of cell
phones. Coltan is mined in the Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of
Congo, where transnational companies supply men with guns to guard their
property. Also, various armies (including the United Nations “peace keeping”
forces) occupying Eastern Congo do little to stop the flow of raw materials
from the Congo. Again, facile “Death by Culture” arguments mute any sustained
analysis of the neoliberal context of resource exploitation and its effects
on the lives of rural women and girls in Central Africa.
I began this chapter by asking that we remember that the women and
girls’ murders in Ciudad Juárez have transnational implications. Major culprits
are trade agreements that led to the exploitative maquiladora system as
well as the United States led War on Drugs, which has actually exploded
drug-trafficking in Latin America, especially in Mexico. All those colonialmilitarypolicing forces might not work completely in concert, but they have
quite devastating consequences for women.
Kristof and WuDunn’s (2009) celebrated book Half the Sky—now a veritable
movement according to their website—leaves out all these messy networks
and institutions and focuses instead on the lone heroic “Third World”
woman, who wins an education and starts a business by herself with a few
kindly Western strangers lending support. Incidentally, Kristof (2006 and
2009) also supports sweatshops or maquilas because, according to him, they
provide much needed work opportunities to women in developing countries.
To conclude, any critique of women’s domestication and criminalization
in one area of the globe, say the global North, will have to take into consideration
the complexity of women’s politics of location, not only living and
acting in the global North, but the way their way of life impacts life around
the globe. My argument has discussed only a limited portion of the rich tapestry
of diverse women’s and girls’ lives and the impact of social policies on
Patriarchal Ideologies and Women’s Domestication 167
their lives and their reaction or resistance to them. Yet, my hope is that we
continue to join forces in the worlds’ social forums and intentional communities
in order to abolish unjust institutions that hinder women and girls’ avenues
for creative self-expression, self-esteem, and playfulness. That may be a
messianic hope, and for now, a footnote to new girls’ and women’s manifestos
yet to be written.
Chapter Eleven
Mechthild Nagel
Alcoff, Linda Martín. (1997) “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity
Crisis in Feminist Theory.” In The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory.
Edited by Linda J. Nicholson. New York: Routledge.
Allen, Paula Gunn. (1984) “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism,”
Sinister Wisdom (Winter), pp. 34–46.
Barr, Mary. (2007) “Some Facts and Anecdotes of Women Arrested and Imprisoned in
the United States.” In Nagel and Asumah, Prisons and Punishment: Reconsidering
Global Penality.
Barstow, Anne L. (1994) Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts.
San Francisco: Pandora.
Baus, Janet, Dan Hunt, and Reid Williams, dirs. (2006) Cruel and Unusual. Alluvial
Filmworks.
Bernstein, Nell. (2005) All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated. New
York: The New Press.
Boudin, Kathy. (2010a) “’Did You See No Potential in Me?’ The Story of Women
Serving Long Sentences in Prison.” In Solinger, Interrupted Life.
———. (2010b) “Prison Education.” Paper presented at workshop on Prisons.
Binghamton
University (April).
210 END OF PRISONS
Butler, Judith. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New
York: Routledge.
Cohen, Sherrill. (1992) The Evolution of Women’s Asylums since 1500: From Refugees
for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Collins, Patricia Hill. (1990) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and
the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Daniels, Lee, dir. (2009) Precious. Lionsgate.
Davis, Angela Y. (2003) Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Open Media.
———. (1998) “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick
Douglass and the Convict Lease System.” In The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Edited
by Joy James. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
———. (1981) Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House.
De Beauvoir, Simone. (1949/1972) The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley.
New York: Penguin.
Dewey, Susan, ed. (2010) “Demystifying Sex Work and Sex Workers,” Wagadu, 8.
http://appweb.cortland.edu/ojs/index.php/Wagadu/article/view/568/803
(accessed 4 September 2012).
Dodge, Mara L. (2006) “Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind”: A Study of Women,
Crime, and Prisons, 1835–2000. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
Elshtain, Jean Bethke. (1993) Public Man, Private Woman. Second Edition. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Feder, Ellen. (2007) Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Federici, Silvia. (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive
Accumulation.
New York: Autonomedia.
Foucault, Michel. (1978) The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. New
York: Pantheon.
———. (1977) Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon.
Freeman, Jo, ed. (1995) Women: A Feminist Perspective. Fifth Edition. Mountain
View, Calif.: Mayfield.
Freeman, Jo. (1995) “The Revolution for Women in Law and Public Policy.” In Freeman,
Women: A Feminist Perspective.
Gage, Matilda Joslyn. (1998 [1893]) Women, Church and State. Edited by Sally
Roesch Wagner. Aberdeen, S.D.: Sky Carrier Press.
García, Ana María, dir. (1982) La Operación.
Glass, Ira. (2010) This American Life. WBNEZ, Chicago (10 September).
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, and Georgina Guzmán. (2010) Making a Killing: Femicide,
Free Trade, and La Frontera. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Gilligan, Carol. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Himmelstein, Kathryn, and Hannah Brückner. (2011) “Criminal-Justice and School
Sanctions against Nonheterosexual Youth: A National Longitudinal Study,” Pediatrics,
127:1, pp. 49–57.
Howe, Adrian. (1994) Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality.
New York: Routledge.
Works Cited 211
James, Joy, (2005) “Introduction: Democracy and Captivity.” In The New Abolitionists:
(Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings. Edited by Joy
James. Albany: SUNY Press.
———. (1996) Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in U.S. Culture.
St. Paul, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press.
Johnson, Paula. (2002) Inner Lives: Profiles of African American Women in Prison.
New York: New York University Press.
Kempadoo, Kamala, and Jo Doezema, eds. (1998) Global Sex Workers: Rights,
Resistance,
and Redefinition. New York: Routledge.
Kilroy, Debbie, and Kim Pate. (2011) “Women are the Fastest Growing Prison
Population:
Why You Should Care,” Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, 20:1, pp. 94–
97.
Kilty, Jennifer M. (2011) “Criminalizing Women—Past and Present,” The Journal of
Prisoners on Prisons, 20:1, pp. 3-16.
Kramer, H., and J. Sprenger. (1971) Malleus Maleficarum. Translated by Montague
Summers. New York: Dover.
Kristof, Nicholas D., and Sheryl WuDunn. (2009) Half the Sky: Turning Oppression
into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. New York: Knopf.
Law, Victoria. (2009) Resistance behind Bars: Struggles of Incarcerated Women.
Oakland, Calif.: PM Press.
LeGates, Marlene. (1995) Feminists before Feminism: Origins and Varieties of Women’s
Protest in Europe and North America before the Twentieth Century. In
Freeman, Women: A Feminist Perspective.
MacKinnon, Catherine. (1983) “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Towards
a Feminist Jurisprudence,” Signs, 8:4, pp. 635–658.
Marshall, Susan E. (1995) Keep Us on the Pedestal: Women against Feminism in
Twentieth Century America. In Freeman, Women: A Feminist Perspective.
Marston, Cathy. (2011) “Stopping the Real ‘Cycle of Violence’: A Feminist Critique
of Patriarchal Battering and the Criminalization of Women by American Police,”
Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, 20:1, pp. 72–83.
———. (2012) “Justice is a Woman.” Unpublished.
Nagel, Mechthild. (2000) “A Week in Court: Chronicling Domestic Violence.”
IthacaToday.
com (August).
———. (2007) “Gender, Incarceration and Peacemaking: Lessons from Germany and
Mali.” In Nagel and Asumah, Prisons and Punishment.
———. (2008) “Prisons as Diasporic Sites: Liberatory Voices from the Diaspora of
Confinement,” Journal of Social Advocacy and Systems Change, 1 (March), pp. 1–
31.
———. (2008) “Women’s Rights behind Walls.” In Saleh-Hanna, Colonial Systems of
Control, pp. 223–244.
———. (2011) “Anti-Black Racism, Gender, and Abolitionist Politics,” Peace Review:
A Journal of Social Justice (July-September), pp. 304–312.
———, and Seth Asumah, eds. (2007) Prisons and Punishment: Reconsidering Global
Penality. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press.
Narayan, Uma. (1997) Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World
Feminism. New York: Routledge.
212 END OF PRISONS
Neve, Lisa, and Kim Pate. (2005) “Challenging the Criminalization of Women who
Resist.” In Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex.
Edited by Julia Sudbury. New York: Routledge.
Nicholson, Linda, ed. (1995) The Second Wave Reader: A Reader in Feminist Theory.
New York: Routledge.
Ochoa, Maria and Barbara Ige, eds. (2007). Shout Out: Women of Color Respond to
Violence. Emeryville, Calif.: Seal Press.
Paley, Noelle Chaddock. (2010). “Girls in Prisons.” Paper presented at Reimagining
Girlhood Conference, SUNY Cortland (October).
Pateman, Carole and Charles Mills. (2007) Contract and Domination. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Patterson, Orlando. (1982) Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Payne, Allison Ann, and Welch, Kelly. (2010) “Racial Threat and Punitive School
Discipline,” Social Problems, 57:1, pp. 25–48.
Ransdell, Lisa. (1995) “Lesbian Feminism and the Feminist Movement.” In Freeman,
Women: A Feminist Perspective.
Ravoira, Lawanda. (2010) “A Call for Gender Equity for Girls in the Juvenile Justice
System.” http://web.archive.org/web/20100204224139/http://www.justiceforall
girls.org /call.html (accessed 4 September 2012).
Saleh-Hanna, Viviane, ed. (2008) Colonial Systems of Control: Criminal Justice in
Nigeria. Ottowa: University of Ottowa Press.
Schnyder, Damien. (2009) First Strike: The Effect of the Prison Regime Upon Public
Education and Black Masculinity in Los Angeles County, California. PhD Dissertation,
University of Texas at Austin.
Sheffield, Carole J. (1995) “Sexual Terrorism.” In Freeman, Women: A Feminist
Perspective.
Smith, Andrea. (2005) Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.
Boston: South End Press.
Solinger, Rickie, et al., eds. (2010) Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated
Women in the United States. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. (2007) “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” in 50
Essays: A Portable Anthology. Second Edition. Edited by Samuel S. Cohen.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Sudbury, Julia. (2010) “Marooned Abolitionists. Black Gender Activists in the AntiPrison Movement in the U.S. and Canada,” Meridians, 9:1, pp. 1–29.
———, ed. (2005) Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex
New York: Routledge.
Sweeny, Megan. (2010) Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in
Women’s Prisons. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Takaki, Ronald. (1995) A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New
York: Little, Brown.
Weissman, Marsha. (2008) “The School to Prison Pipeline and Criminalizing Youth:
Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives,” The Link: Connecting Juvenile Justice
and Child Welfare, 6:4, pp. 6–9, 15–17.
Works Cited 213
Weitz, Rose. (1995) “What Price Independence? Social Reactions to Lesbians, Spinsters,
Widows, and Nuns.” In Freeman, Women: A Feminist Perspective.
White, Armond. (2009) Pride and Precious. (personal blog) http://hiphopandpolitics
.wordpress .com/2009/11/19/armond-white-precious-is-the-most-damaging-filmtothe-black-image-since-birth-of-a-nation/ (accessed 4 September 2012).
Williams, Wendy. (1997) “The Equality Crisis: Some Reflections on Culture, Courts,
and Feminism.” In Nicholson, The Second Wave.
Ybanez, Victoria Lucia. (2007) “The Evolution of Domestic Violence Efforts across
Indian Country.” In Ochoa and Ige, Shout Out: Women of Color Respond to Violence.
Young, Iris M. (1994) “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social
Collective,”
Signs, 19:3, pp. 713–738.
Zinn, Howard. (2003) A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present. New
York: HarperCollins.
To be cited:
Mechthild Nagel, “Patriarchal Ideologies and Women’s Domestication.” The End of Prisons (Nagel and Nocella, eds.), Rodopi, 2013, pp. 147-­‐168.